Like the hands of an aged clock rhythmically striking, the waves crashed into the rocks with systematic intensity. The waves crashed with such force, large sprays of the cool sea water could be felt a hundred feet above the cliffs where a young girl sat staring out over the ocean. She sat there, with her knees perfectly tucked towards her chest as the cool Atlantic breeze blew through her knotty blond hair. Any other girl her age would have long retreated to somewhere warm and dry. But she wasn’t much like any other girl.

Bellow the mop of blond hair was a girl with fierce brown eyes and tucked under an almost always furrowed brow. She never looked at someone in their eyes, but always it seemed to that person right past them, like she was in aristocrat from a social class from times long ago. This perceived arrogance made her an instant outcast, so she spend most of her time on this long natural jetty of land by her father’s estate. She was wearing a simple cotton dress that was slowly becoming damp around her legs the water spayed into the air.

Trapped between being a child and a woman, she was left to her own devices. Barely ten, she knew that it wouldn’t be long before her mother would try to turn her into a proper Southern woman. But that would wait for now. Now she just tilted her head back and opened her mouth as the air, so thick filled her lungs and sent shivers down her spine. She was home.

Suddenly something happened that broke her almost complete respite. It was neither seen nor heard, but something told her that something was happening. She slipped back on her soft leather sandals and walked slowly to the cliff’s edge. She never could properly describe what happened at that moment. Something she saw would throw the rest of her life end over end, but little did she know that then.

All she saw was a small splash. Shrugging it off as an illusion she began to turn her back to return to her favorite spot before she noticed something in the water. It was not much, but there certainly was something there. It started off as a shadow, scarcely bigger than any fish that was common in those parts of the bay, but it slowly got bigger and bigger. Stretching and contorting, the dark shadowy figure was closer to a hundred feet long before the girl let off a blood curdling scream. Opening her eyes again, and peering below, nothing was left.

No shadow, no monster. The water was perfectly calm, as if all those hours of crashing waves were not the process of peace and nature, but of some horrid monster living in the dark shadows of the water. Growing faint, she leaned her small boney body on one of the outcroppings of rock for support. Pressing against the rock, as the sun finally began to beat steadily down upon her, she began to fade into a deep sleep. The world she had known her entire life was to forever be altered by that day on the rocks.